Aston Villa's former transfer committee were so far out of their depth that "had they appeared on Only Fools and Horses they would have been fleeced of everything".

That is the verdict of Ron Atkinson, who uses Tom Fox, Paddy Riley and Hendrik Almstadt's as examples of the folly of over-relying on Moneyball statistical methods.

Big Ron remains a big believer that the best way to scout talent is to put in the miles to physically go and watch players in action.

He writes about the subject in his latest book Ron Atkinson The Manager.

"The endless motorway has now been replaced by an endless stream of player statistics that form the theory of Moneyball - the use of statistics to identify potential transfers.

Tom Fox, Hendrik Almstadt and Paddy Riley at Aston Villa

"The club that has suffered more in the pursuit of Moneyball than any other in recent times has been Aston Villa.

"They had a chief executive in Tom Fox, who was not a football man, a sporting director in Hendrik Almstadt, a man Arsene Wenger thought should be let nowhere near the Villa training ground, and Paddy Riley, a director of scouting and recruitment who relied extensively on computers and statistics.

"They were precisely the sort of people who had they appeared on Only Fools and Horses would have been fleeced of everything. Their Bundesliga specialist lived in Australia."

Fox and Almstadt left the club by mutual consent towards the end of the relegation season in 2015-16, with Riley following them out of the door in the summer of 2016.

"The forward I had long been interested in was Dean Saunders. I had tried to buy him when he was at Derby but he chose to go to Liverpool, although after only one season at Anfield I heard Graeme Souness was prepared to let him go.

"We agreed a fee for £2.5 million very quickly but Doug Ellis dragged his heels as he attempted to chip away at the price.

"Doug was trying to outsmart the Liverpool secretary, Peter Robinson, who had worked with Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish. It was a pointless waste of our time.

"The impasse lasted for two weeks, with Deano ringing me up asking when the move was going to happen or if it was going to happen.

"I was starting to become anxious because my rule of thumb was that my most successful transfers had been those done quickly.

"The ones that had taken an age were generally those that had not come off.

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"Things were not going well on the pitch. Aston Villa had won only one of our first five Premier League games.

"We had just lost 3-1 at home to Chelsea and the chairman was starting to take a lot of flak on the radio phone-ins.

"On the Saturday I was driving to Villa Park for our fixture against Crystal Palace when Steve Stride rang me with a query: "The chairman wants to know the state of play with the Saunders deal."

"Steve the deal is exactly what it was two weeks ago."

"Ok, we will do it."

"Before kick off I went to the PA announcer and asked for his microphone and marched towards the Holte End.